Saving the environment might include stricter governmental regulations, but what can college… Saving the environment might include stricter governmental regulations, but what can college students do? Ironically, energy and food conservation would be good ways to start.

It all started during finals week, when I took a 2 a.m. stroll through the men’s restroom at the Cathedral of Learning to discover a bit of scatological poetry. It was a flyer posted over the urinal, which read, “If it’s brown, flush it down, if it’s yellow, leave it mellow.” At first glance I assumed it was a joke by a freshman with an exam-induced fever. However, the poem was followed by a statistic of how many gallons of water Americans flush away each year in their toilets.

Having taken a geology class, I was immediately alert to the thousands of gallons being pulled out of the ground or scooped out of the rivers, pumped to my bathroom and then spilling from my domicile back into the three rivers. It was water I could never get back. And that upset me.

For the next two weeks, I was meticulous about my water-usage. I felt better about myself, thinking I had become a conscientious water consumer, fighting back against the American impulse to use however much water I wanted.

When I finally got around to looking up some facts on the United States Geological Survey Web site, I discovered a little more about my impact. Toilet flushes average three gallons each. By cutting down from three flushes to one flush, you can save six gallons a day and possibly 2190 gallons a year. Good job, me.

However, while I smugly took a shower each morning for that two weeks, relishing an extra two minutes just thinking about how much water I saved the day before, I used an extra four gallons. That’s because the average shower’s water-usage is two gallons per minute. Knowing this, I could try to take three-minute showers, down from 12 minutes, and save 6570 gallons a year. But even that’s nothing to be proud about.

However much I save, the United States still uses about 408 billion gallons a day, of which domestic usemakes up less than only 1 percent. Even if half the people in the United States cut down by 10 gallons a day, the water saved – less than two billion gallons – would be relatively little. My saving 25 gallons a day is negligible.

Someone might argue that it would still be water saved. But if we really wanted to conserve a lot of water, the big consumers are energy and irrigation. Power stations use half our water supply when they convert water to steam in order to spin turbines. Crop irrigation uses another third of our water supply, because it involves a large volume of water sprayed onto crops that can easily evaporate. Interestingly, we are conserving water when we turn off lights that aren’t in use and when we eat a little less at a meal.

By saving energy and eating less, we are spending less money while increasing the available supply of both food and electricity. By allowing more supply, elementary economics tells us that prices should recede on both. So far these are all good things. Suppliers of both will have to cut back on production and therefore use less water: With less demand for corn, there’s little sense in producing the same amounts. As production slows, so should water-usage.

Now we just need at least half of the U.S. population to follow along. Remember, they’re all supposed to be spending money right now so that our economy doesn’t recede. We could be pessimistic about sufficient mobilization or be as ignorant to decide conservation isn’t even worth the hit to our economy in the first place. However, I have reason to believe that conservation of fuel and food while preserving the economy is possible.

The reason comes from the fact that domestic water-usage actually dropped between 1980 and 1985 and has risen less than 3 percent every five years since – understandable growth when remembering that population has risen at the same time. The only reason water-usage dropped is that enough people were convinced it was necessary. But the change they engendered didn’t crash our economy. It’s still here today.

It seems we’vereturned to the same old problem: You can’t do much in isolation. One college student isn’t going to change the world, the nation or even the neighborhood. If a college student really wants to change anything, it seems what’s necessary isn’t energy and passion fueling a microcosmic change, but patience in convincing other people that there’s good reason to save water. Conservation of water might not even include the conserver coming into contact with water.

But in the mean time: Save the rivers. Eat smaller portions.

E-mail Dan at [email protected].